"Worthy of mention here is that Wal Mart apparently didn’t have a senior management fixer to deal with the problems at inception. (This person is basically a head kicker, able to fire with a phone call and do the damage control ASAP.)

They had a remote process from the Mexican end to corporate headquarters. That’s a classic mistake. The only way to control internal problems is with a fast moving process which can keep up with developments and stop the rot. You just can’t do these things at a bureaucratic pace any more."

So, what would've been the answer for Walmart?

There needed to be a go-to solution in-house, but there wasn't. Management needed a place to go to for help — a person with the authority to say "enough," and do it quickly.

And if the corporate culture was too far gone to provide the solution itself — after all, current and former CEOs Mike Duke and Lee Scott were both briefed on the situation, according to the New York Times report — Walmart required external checks in place. It needed someone on the outside to track down the problems and protect Walmart's best interests. Importantly, they would need the authority to put a stop to it.

Walmart's structure had neither of these things. Instead, it had a massive multinational bureaucracy, and look what happened.